• by March 14, 2005

FAST, GOOD, OR CHEAP? PICK TWO -- In this age of six stigma feng shui quality management, the question occasionally arises in the media services world: Can media planning and buying be managed in the same way as other industrial subcomponents? The answer is a definite maybe. But you have to ask yourself an even more basic question before you can get to that: What actually constitutes a "quality" media buy? When you know the answer to that, only then can you begin to develop media management systems that ensure that kind of quality. It may seem like a simple question befitting a simple answer, but it is one that has been confounding some of the biggest media minds in the world. Thank goodness they're finally doing something about it. Some of them, like General Motors Corp. and Procter & Gamble Co., are not entirely sure what they actually want, but at least they're trying to move in new directions to see if they can uncover the truth along the way.

That was evident last year when P&G staged the biggest review of the year to transform its disparate media planning accounts into a consolidated communications planning approach. The only reason that consolidation ended up at two agencies, is that P&G is so big it likes to have a second opinion, especially when it's trying to do something as mindshare-altering as changing the way people interact with its media messages. No one's exactly sure how the change has impacted P&G's approach to communications. Heck, no one's exactly sure what communications planning actually means.

That was evident a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans when attendees at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference gave themselves essentially the same grade - a "C-" - that P&G marketing chief Jim Stengel gave them a year earlier at the same trade show, because they hadn't risen to the communications planning occasion. Stengel did his best to kick them in the butt. He even held a big communications account review to get their attention.

But a year later, opinions of what communications planning actually means continued to vary. Thirteen percent said it was a "media-centric" approach, 27 percent said it was a "consumer-centric" approach, and 60 percent said it was a combination of a media and consumer centric approach to planning media. In fact, most of the attendees at this year's conference didn't even know how important it was. Only 38 percent identified it as the "most important" development in the media planning and buying business.

Actually, we're relieved. We thought we were the only ones confused about this stuff. It seems a lot of people are. And while we wait to see if the fruits of P&G's communications labor enlighten us, we have to ask the media management team at General Motors to clarify what it expects from a quality media buy? Of course, they won't be answering us for another couple of months, but when they do, it could help clarify the direction for other marketers and media services shops worldwide. It could also have a profound impact on the media they deal with.

Ah, but it seems like we've fallen into the management consultancy trap and managed to make an intrinsically simple question - what constitutes a quality media buy - into an overly complex one. We had too. Otherwise today's column would have been far too short, and our readers would have felt we weren't delivering a quality Riff.

So let's put the managementspeak aside for a moment and talk in simple English. And to do that, we'd like to quote the team at Ernst & Young, which once managed to put the whole organizational management thing into a much simpler context for us than the hyper-inflated thinking we occasionally hear from academia, the book circuit, or even Booz, or McKinsey. And they put it to us with three simple words: Fast. Good. Cheap.

"Pick two," they said, "because you can only ever have two of those."

As far as management epiphanies go, the light bulb E&Y lit over our heads was brighter than any ever made by General Electric. It illuminated not only how organizations are managed, but the most fundamental aspects of our marketplace.

In case it didn't hit you right away, let your mind linger on those three words for a moment. Fast! Good! Cheap! Think about them. You can make something fast and it can be quite good, but it's not going to be cheap to do it. You can make something fast and cheap, but chances are it's not going to be all that good. And of course, you can make something good and cheap, but it's going to take some time.

Aside from becoming the governing principle behind Riff column writing, that concept is one we think can be applied to almost any area of corporate American and most definitely to the field of media planning and buying, or even, if you will, to communications planning.

So, let us rephrase the question for the GM media team. Do you want your media buys to be fast and cheap? Do you wan them to be cheap and good? Or do you want them to be fast and good?

If their current review follows the pattern of recent history, the answer will likely be a procurement department driven one: fast and cheap. If they follow the genuine promise of communications planning, the answer might be either good and cheap, or better yet, fast and good. But to do that, they're going to have to figure out a way to encourage their agencies to think and act faster and better. That, of course, will mean better media compensation models, which of course, are in the opposite direction of the way the marketing world is going. And the opposite path from what led to the creation of GM's current Mediaworks set-up.

Whether GM's media accounts end up at the tactically-driven, and operationally proficient Interpublic team, or with the strategically-minded and communications-oriented zealots at Publicis, we hope that the one thing that doesn't get lost in the mix is that it takes a quality client to make a quality media product. And some people still think that is job No. 1.